Quote

Competing pressures tempt one to believe that an issue deferred is a problem avoided more often it is a crisis invited.

Henry A. Kissinger

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Henry A. Kissinger
Pressure
Deferred
Issues
Tempt
Often
Pressures
Problem
Avoided
Believe
Invited
Competing
Issue
Crisis

More quotes by Henry A. Kissinger

Image
Iraq has to be made an international, and not just a national American problem.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
Historically when there is a rising power like China, it has usually led to confrontations between the rising power and the existing dominant powers. And when you have a shift of the center of gravity of world affairs from the Atlantic to the Pacific, then you have an additional element.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
The defining issue is that the government in Taiwan was considered to be the government of all of China, and the authorities in Beijing were not recognized as a government of China. So Taiwan was the residuary for all of China.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
You become a superpower by being strong but also by being wise and by being farsighted. But no state is strong or wise enough to create a world order alone.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
A return to the 1967 lines and the abandonment of the settlements near Jerusalem would be such a psychological trauma for Israel as to endanger its survival.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
Don't be too ambitious. Do the most important thing you can think of doing every year and then your career will take care of itself.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
Any international system must have two key elements for it to work. One, it has to have a certain equilibrium of power that makes overthrowing the system difficult and costly. Secondly, it has to have a sense of legitimacy.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
Diplomats operate through deadlock, which is the way by which two sides can test each other's determination. Even if they have egos for it few heads of government have the time to resolve stalemates, their meetings are too short and the demands of protocol too heavy.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
I think China will do nothing to obstruct it, and they probably will go along with it.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
The convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
I have always expressed respect for those people who make public declarations.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
The Gorbachev period is conceived as an abandonment of historic Russian positions. So this is the framework, in my view, in which Putin operates.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
I was always convinced that decent people in the case of Vietnam, highly intelligent, decent people, got us involved because they had made, in part, a misjudgment about the nature of the communist system and the unity of the communist world and the degree to which the experience of Europe could be repeated in Vietnam.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
In his essay, ‘Perpetual Peace,’ the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that perpetual peace would eventually come to the world in one of two ways, by human insight or by conflicts and catastrophes of a magnitude that left humanity no other choice. We are at such a juncture.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
History knows no resting places and no plateaus
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
Withdrawal of US troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public: The more US troops come home, the more will be demanded.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
With respect to the relationship between nuclear weapons and the advent of détente, one has to consider two things. One, the nature of nuclear weapons in themselves, and secondly, the advent of nuclear parity.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
In the end, peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power.
Henry A. Kissinger